Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Trading 8s tends to bestow the honor of “Journalist of the Year” on unorthodox journalists. Some might say they aren’t even journalists. At least, not in the Woodward-and-Bernstein kind of way. The 2009 award went to Ezra Klein, who’s known more for his blogging, and the 2010 award went to Paul Krugman, an economist who snuck in the back door of The New York Times with an op-ed column and a blog. This year, we push the boundaries even further.

Mike Daisey doesn’t work for a newspaper or a TV station or any kind of news outlet. He maintains a blog, but that’s just to keep his fans up-to-date. Mike Daisey’s real work is on the stage because Mike Daisey is a monologist.

I had to look up what that word means. A monologist performs monologues–or, you might call them, one-man shows.

Apparently, Mike Daisey has been King of the Monologists for several years, but let’s face it, that’s a pretty small kingdom. So I didn’t know what to expect when I went to see his show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” in downtown Manhattan in early December.